Archive for November, 2011

New research suggests the mere act of walking through a doorway helps people forget, which could explain many millions of confusing moments that happen each day around the world. A study published recently in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology found that participants who walked through doorways in a virtual reality environment were significantly more likely to forget memories formed in another room, compared with those who traveled the same distance but crossed no thresholds.

What’s the News: For most of us, our senses stay relatively separate: that is, we hear what we hear and see what we see. People with synesthesia, however, actually see words as colors, taste a particular flavor when they hear a familiar song, or experience other strong, automatic linkages between senses. The neurological underpinnings of the condition—how the brain connects two usually distinct senses—have remained a mystery. But researchers have now found a possible cause, they reported yesterday: neurons in the area responsible for the second sensation, such as the color that goes with the word, may be unusually excitable.

What’s The News: Three 16-year-old teenage boys in Texas had heart attacks shortly after smoking a product called k2, or Spice, according to a study published this month in the journal Pediatrics. The report highlights a growing public health problem: the increased availability and use of synthetic cannabinoids, which when smoked mimic the effects of marijuana but typically can’t be detected in drug tests. While the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency secured an emergency, one-year ban of five synthetic cannabinoids in March of this year, most of the hundreds of such chemicals remain basically legal, widely available, little understood, and potentially harmful.

New satellite images have revealed more than a hundred ancient fortified settlements still standing in the Sahara. The settlements, located in what today is southern Libya, were built by the Garamantes, a people who ruled much of the area for nearly a thousand years until their empire fragmented around 700 AD. Information about the Garamantes is relatively scarce: Other than the accounts of classical historians (who aren’t known for careful accuracy) and excavations of the Garamantian capital city in the 1960s, archaeologists haven’t had a lot to go on. During the decades-long reign of Muammar Gadhafi, antiquities and archaeology weren’t exactly a national priority; the fortresses were largely ignored. As David Mattingly, the British archaeologist who led the project, said to OurAmazingPlanet of the discoveries: “It is like someone coming to England and suddenly discovering all the medieval castles.”

Sometimes, the results of science can be a little cryptic. But other times, data can be as beautiful as it is information rich. Betsy Mason over at Wired Science has a gallery of geological maps of volcanoes that demonstrate exactly that, with a rainbow of colors indicating different types of rock and lava flows from millennia of eruptions. Which mountain is your favorite?

The gist of the opponents’ argument is this: While the problem of online piracy is real, the way this law is written, it means that the government may make email companies and internet service providers monitor links you send through email or on social networking sites. It also means that someone from the government or a private corporation can cause a whole site to be removed from Google results and block people from viewing it, as well as preventing online payments from being made to the person who owns the site. It is, essentially, a law that creates a government blacklist, a la the Great Firewall of China.

San Francisco has its share of massive earthquakes, but the Bay Bridge, one of the city’s main transit arteries, is not as quake-safe as you’d hope. That’s why, alongside it, the state is building a massive new replacement structure—the largest self-supporting suspension bridge ever built. Jim Giles at New Scientist went to visit the bridge and provides a primer on its engineering:

In a regular suspension bridge, the cables that support the roadway are hung between two or more towers, like a hammock between trees, and anchored at each end by a connection to land. The new bridge is more like a sling. A single cable loops under the roadway, over the tower and beneath the roadway on the other side of the tower. The enormous forces placed on the cable by the road cancel out, leaving a structure that is balanced but not directly supported by a land anchor…

As the [road] segment fell into place it revealed the full length of tower that stands behind it, an elegant structure made up of four concrete pillars. These drop into enormous steel foundations, parts of which were built in Texas and shipped to California via the Panama canal. The pillars are connected by “shear beams”—relatively weak steel components that are designed to break if the towers move. The two roadways, one each for east and westbound traffic, hang from the cables but are not attached directly to the tower. This arrangement means that the four pillars and two roadways will sway when a quake hits, but remain intact even through the strongest shaking that geologists expect the region to experience over the next 1500 years.

Hookworms are longer-lived than viruses and bacteria;
they could have had a more significant effect on human evolution.

Humans live in all sorts of places—high deserts, tropical lowlands, frigid tundra. Over the millennia, you’d expect each population’s assortment of genes to evolve to reflect the demands and dangers of its home environment: those who live in the deserts would possess genes for extra skin pigments to help keep their tender integument from burning (like African peoples), and those who live in sub-zero climes much of the year would have genes that keep them well-insulated in fat (like the Inuit). But what if factors other than climate, like the food available nearby or the viruses, bacteria, and parasites native to the area, also had an effect on various human populations’ genetic toolkits?

It’s a fascinating question, but, given that we have to reconstruct all this supposed evolution from the current state of modern genomes, finding an answer isn’t easy. A recent paper takes an important first step by looking for correlations between 500,000 different genetic markers and certain environmental characteristics, like humidity, temperature, the local diet, and the prevalence of parasites and other pathogens.